An important part of any long-term project is the human element, particularly if you are relying on groups of individuals to work together as a team. Making sure that everyone works well together and that they feel like a cohesive unit (rather than disparate individuals) can be as important as any technical skills that your individual team members might have. One way to ensure that your team members work well together is to host a team building activity.

What is a virtual team building activity?

Virtual team building activities cover a huge range of different kinds of activities, since it is basically any group activity that you and your team members participate in while online. This means that everything from a group icebreaker meeting to a team online escape room to a virtual cooking class can be a virtual team building activity, meaning that you’ll have a lot of different options available to you when it comes to choosing the best team building activity for your team.

Options for your next virtual team building event

The options for virtual team building activities are essentially endless, but some of them tend to rise to the top in terms of accessibility, affordability, and popularity. Here are just a few of the best when it comes to running a virtual team building event.

Holiday events

When the holidays roll around, you may want to consider hosting a virtual holiday party or gift exchange. These events are excellent ways to celebrate the end of the year with your team members and have a festive and social event to reward your team members for a job well done. These events can include everything from fun art activities to virtual gift exchanges like white elephant exchanges and Secret Santa events.

White Elephant Gift Exchange: Ring in the end of the year with a white elephant gift exchange. In this classic holiday event, your team members will take turns opening gifts or stealing those gifts that their team members have opened. At the end of the event, everyone will know the gift they have received, and it will be shipped right to their homes. A talented host will keep the event moving and everyone is sure to have a great time. Premium versions of the event are also available.

Virtual Secret Santa Gift Exchange: If you want to hold a more traditional gift exchange, consider a Secret Santa gift exchange. In this fun holiday event, everyone on your team will be randomly assigned another participant to give a gift, and they will be given a few weeks (and potentially some support from the organizers) to secretly sneak that gift into the office. Then, at a chosen time (a party, near a break, just a regular Friday), everyone will come together and open their gifts, attempting to deduce who their Secret Santa really was. This can be another fun game in and of itself, or it can be part of another holiday celebration.

Virtual Office Holiday Party: The holidays are the perfect time of the year to bring your team together to celebrate, relax, and become closer as colleagues and team members. There are so many different options available to you that you are sure to find the kind of holiday event that will be a hit with your team members. You can host holiday-themed art and cooking events, winter mixology courses, end-of-year games, hold a gift exchange, or do all or none of these things. A holiday party offers you a lot of different options that you’ll be able to customize to perfectly fit what you want to get out of your holiday party.

Virtual Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are popular team building activities, since they encourage team members to work together and engage in lateral thinking while still being enjoyable activities to do together. However, they run into logistics problems since you need your team members to all go to the same physical space, and they become unwieldy even with 8-10 participants. Virtual Escape rooms address this by giving your team members the chance to solve puzzles, gather clues, and move through expertly designed games in a virtual space hosted and organized by a professional game master.

One of Dozens of Virtual Escape Rooms: When it comes to virtual escape rooms, you have a surfeit of options. Whether you want to solve a mystery, rewrite history, go on an arctic adventure, or escape a particularly unpleasant holiday party, you can sign your team members up for an online escape room and solve puzzles, gather clues, and piece together solutions to the overarching challenge. These events are run by experienced hosts and are sure to provide a challenging and thought-provoking activity for your team members.

One of the most appealing aspects of an escape room is the intricate theming and gorgeous props that make it feel like more than just a small room. While you may think that this goes away in a virtual space, these escape rooms are still impressive, unforgettable experiences that invoke the feeling of a physical escape room. These events are led by professional hosts with plenty of experience guiding participants through the puzzles, keeping them on track and focused, and providing assistance when necessary. Your team members will be in for a real escape room experience when signing up for any of these challenges.

Also, like physical escape rooms, the theming and difficulty are variable to ensure that you are getting exactly what you want out of the escape room. There are traditional escape room themes like a murder mystery or a journey through the Arctic, nostalgic themes like escaping the 90s or the 00s, and light-hearted themes like escaping a holiday Christmas party or helping comic superheroes on a mission. These events can last between 45 minutes to 90 minutes, and they accommodate groups of any size (though breaking up into smaller teams is recommended for particularly large groups) and once your team members have completed their first escape game, they may be ready to sign up for a second right away.

Tasting Events

Tasting events are great ways to reward team members and introduce them to new and interesting artisanal goods (and thereby improve participation in the event). In a virtual tasting event, which can offer tastings like chocolate, cheese, wine, or even whiskey, your team members will receive a shipment of relevant samples, and a host will guide your team members through a tasting, explaining the science and history of their samples and teaching them how professionals taste and judge a given sample.

Virtual Wine and Cheese Tasting: If you are looking to celebrate your team’s accomplishments, consider a virtual wine and cheese tasting workshop. In this event, everyone will receive a curated box of artisanal wine and cheese, and a professional sommelier will guide them through the process that a professional taster uses when judging these kinds of goods. Participants will also learn about the history and science of wine and cheese, so the event doubles as an informative experience.

Whiskey: Whiskey is one of the uniquely American spirits that has been exported across the globe (and now has a significant international presence), and in this tasting event, you and your team members will have a chance to sample some of the finest and most complex whiskies available. You’ll learn what makes a whiskey a whiskey (and how it rye, bourbon, and scotch differ in terms of taste and the legal requirements to be called as such), and a professional host will guide you through the process professional whiskey-tasters use to make their judgements and teaching your team members the history of the spirit. If you are looking for a unique alternative to a wine tasting event, a whiskey tasting event is likely to be right up your alley.

Virtual Chocolate Tasting Event: There is a reason that chocolate has become so culturally ubiquitous (and so many holidays are associated with it), but many people don’t consider just how complex and varied chocolate can be, given that most people won’t seek out that much artisanal chocolate. In this event, everyone will have a box of fine artisanal chocolate shipped directly to their door, and over the course of the event, a professional host will guide them through the complexities of different kinds of chocolate making traditions, the history of chocolate and chocolatiering and the different types of chocolates that make the sweet so diverse across the globe. If you are looking for a tasting event that everyone on your team can participate in and enjoy, a chocolate tasting event is very likely to be a great idea.

Virtual Coffee Tasting Event: It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that some of your team members really need their morning coffee in order to function. For a fun tasting experience, consider expanding your team members’ coffee paletes in this exciting event. Your team members will receive a sample box of some rare and unique coffee flavors alongside instructions on how to prepare them at home. Then, once the event starts, a professional host will take your team members on a guided tasting tour as they sample the coffees and learn about the histories and brewing traditions that have made modern coffee what we think of today.

Cooking and Mixology Classes

You can also host a cooking or mixology class in a virtual space. These events feature step-by-step instructions from a professional chef or mixologist and hands-on practice making the chosen dish or drinks in the comfort of your team members’ homes. These events are good ways to bring your team members together for a shared experience that also doubles as a practical lesson that will help make your team members more engaged. These events also offer a wide range of different menus and dish options for organizers to choose from.

Virtual Mixology Workshop: Bring happy hour to your team members’ homes in this hands-on mixology course. Everyone who participates will get all of the equipment, syrups, and bitters they need to create a trio of artisanal cocktails at home. The menus are flexible, and there are plenty of options for substituting spirits (or making non-alcoholic versions of the cocktails), so everyone will be able to participate. Everyone will leave the class with their drinks in hand and the skills and tools they need to recreate them again and again.

One of the best aspects of a virtual mixology workshop is that mixology is a relatively easy skill to pick up, and there isn’t a lot of time investment involved in making a mixed drink (alcoholic or otherwise). While a “quick meal” might take 20 minutes to prepare (more if you include clean-up), even the most elaborate mixed drinks only take about 10-15 minutes (and it isn’t as if you are going to be regularly making Ramos Gin Fizzes). This means that you can learn how to make a trio of cocktails and have downtime for some casual chatting and lessons on the history and science of mixology.

In addition, unlike most cooking classes, mixology events are incredibly easy to customize to fit the needs of your team members. Mixed drinks offer a lot of options for different substitutions depending on a person’s taste, and, very often, changing a single ingredient will make a different drink entirely rather than requiring a massive shift in the other ingredients. So, for example, if you are making a Negroni but you don’t care for gin, you can just swap in bourbon and, viola, you have a Boulevardier. This means that it is very easy for anyone to customize their personal menus on the fly.

Finally, you can very easily theme your event around a specific kind of drink or spirit. If you want to make some tiki drinks that are perfect for lounging on the beach, there are rum workshops available. If you want to learn how to make fancy party drinks, you can sign up for a workshop that aims to teach you how to make the perfect punch or martini. Enjoy American whiskey? There are programs for that. No matter what kind of drinks you want your team members to learn how to make, there is sure to be a workshop that will fit your needs.

Virtual New York Style Pretzel Making: Learn the art of making perfect oven-baked pretzels in this team-building cooking workshop. Your team members will receive all the ingredients they need to make their own pretzels from scratch, and they will get step-by-step instructions on everything from making the dough to toppings and dips. In only one workshop, everyone will have their own collection of delicious pretzels and be ready to start experimenting with other baked goods.

Virtual Pizza From Scratch: Every year, Americans consume around 3 billion pizzas (which comes out to about 6 full-sized pizzas per person), making it one of the most popular foods in the country. They also eat primarily takeout and frozen pizza, making it one of the more expensive foods to eat regularly. By enrolling your team members in a pizza making workshop, you can help them save money and become more adept around the kitchen, which is sure to go over well across the board. In this hands-on workshop, everyone on your team will get the ingredients they need to make homemade, oven-baked pizza, and an instructor will guide them step-by-step through the recipe. At the end of the event, everyone will have their own personal pizza ready to eat, so attendance is unlikely to be a problem.

Virtual Sushi Making: Sushi has become incredibly popular over the last decade or so, to the point where sushi restaurants are popping up all over the suburbs, and you can find (dubious) California rolls at your local gas station. Sushi can seem like an intimidating meal to prepare, but it is actually relatively easy to make, assuming you have a bit of training. In this workshop, you and your team members will learn how to prepare rice, source and filet fish and assemble rolls and nigiri to create a perfect appetizer or dinner entree in no time at all. The menu is relatively customizable and there are non-fish options for anyone who is allergic or has some trepidations about eating raw tuna.

Virtual Pasta Making: Pasta is one of the few kinds of food that seems to crop up in every culture and cuisine. No matter what kind of food you want to make, knowing how to make homemade pasta can make the process much easier and more delicious. In this homemade pasta workshop, all of your team members will get a package of dry ingredients shipped directly to their homes and, during the workshop, a professional chef will guide them through the process of preparing the dough, rolling and shaping the pasta and cooking it to perfection. All of the skills taught in this workshop are easy to transfer to other recipes, making it an ideal course for anyone looking to learn a versatile cooking skill.

Art Workshops

Art classes, which can be as simple as a drawing class or as elaborate as a terrarium building workshop, are a good way to give your team members a chance to participate in a relaxing and fun event together without a lot of stakes or a sense of competition. Everyone will have the chance to express themselves creatively and show off their finished project at the end of the event. These events are excellent for letting your team members get to know more about one another in a relaxing, low-stakes environment.

Terrarium Workshop: Experience a unique artistic event in this live online terrarium building workshop. Using rocks, mosses and succulents, your team members will create a living work of art that doubles as a fully functioning ecosystem that they can put on display in their home or office. Most of your team members will never have been part of an art workshop like this, so the event is sure to attract some attention.

Virtual Clay Hand Building: If you are looking for a more traditional art event, consider this clay hand building workshop. Your team members will receive all of the clay they need to create their own planters, pots or mugs and they will have the opportunity to show off their creations to the rest of their team members at the end of the event. Since this workshop uses air drying clay, there is no need to do anything beyond wait a little while before you can start using your personalized clay creation.

Paint & Sip: If you are interested in hosting an art event with the lowest-stakes imaginable (keeping your non-artists in mind), consider a paint and sip event. These popular events are easily held online, and everyone on your team will get a pre-drawn canvas (of your choosing) and the paint and supplies they need to join their team members for a night of light-hearted socializing, painting and adult libations. You can also have those drinks shipped straight to your participants if you are feeling generous.

Virtual Candle Making: Virtual candle making is a fun workshop that teaches attendees practical skills that they can use to create their own bespoke artisanal candles at home. In this hands-on art course, you and your team members will get a box of supplies shipped directly to your homes and you’ll use these supplies to make your own personalized scented candles with the help of a professional instructor who will walk everyone through the process step-by-step. At the end of the event, everyone will have a new candle to burn in their homes or to give as a gift and everyone will have the knowledge to try their hands at more complex candle making projects.

Team Building Games

Another fun option for a virtual team building activity is to host an online game night. These games, which include block building competitions, scavenger hunts, bingo or team building friendly versions of popular game shows, are easy-to-understand and fun to play games that everyone on your team is bound to enjoy. Regardless of what kind of game you choose to run, a virtual game night is sure to help bring your team members together.

Feud Frenzy: Have your team members telling each other ‘good answer’ in this virtual spin on the classic game show format. Team members will compete to see who has their finger on the pulse of the common man and they’ll do so while having some laughs with a skilled host who will ensure the event runs smoothly. This event can accommodate larger teams who will compete in multiple rounds against one another.

Virtual Game Show Bingo: In this revised take on the admittedly stale game of bingo, team members will compete to fill out their bingo cards by completing tasks around their homes, doing miniature scavenger hunts, and answering pop culture trivia. Your team members will be sure to have fun in this competitive spin on the classic game that will see them putting a host of different skills to the test.

Brick Building Challenge: If you are looking for a more tactile game for your team members to play, the brick building competition might be right up your alley. Everyone will receive a box of LEGO bricks, and a host will guide them through multiple, fast-paced competitions that require creativity and three dimensional thinking. This event is perfect for any team looking for a unique, fun, and slightly competitive team building workshop.

Mini Game Showdown: Why choose just one game for your team’s virtual game night when you can do a lightning round of different options, including rounds of trivia, speed typing, feud frenzy, and escape room puzzles? These fast-paced events come as quickly as they go, so you’ll be moving quickly as your team members compete on a wide range of different skill sets. Everyone will find something to love in this lightning mini-game showdown.

Group Trivia

There is a reason that bar trivia has become such a popular group activity, and for large teams, a virtual trivia event can be a good online substitute. In a virtual trivia event, you’ll be able to put your team members’ knowledge to the test in a general subject or themed trivia event. These trivia events blend competitive fun with collaborative team work and are sure to be a hit amongst your team members as they vie to demonstrate who amongst them has the most trivial knowledge on hand.

Private Virtual Trivia: Test your team members’ knowledge of history, science, popular culture and more in this fun alternative to bar trivia. These trivia competitions will see participants working in teams to determine who has the most esoteric knowledge in your office and learning who knows more about certain subjects than you might think. Plus, since it is virtual, everyone can relax and enjoy a beverage of their choosing as the event takes place.

If you want to expand on your trivia options, you can also consider a themed trivia event, like trivia focusing on movies, music, history or a specific decade like the 90s. This level of focus can be great for teams working on specific projects or who share similar interests or it can simply be a way to discover more about your team members’ individual skills. You can even go more narrow with your focus and host something like a pop culture trivia night, a culinary cuisine trivia night or wine and spirits trivia night.

There are also themed trivia nights focused on contemporary social and cultural issues, like events designed for Black History Month, Women’s History Month, AAPI Month and Pride. These events provide participants with a fun and engaging blend of education and camaraderie as they answer questions about the history of important social movements and the important contributions that diverse sets of people have made to the fabric of the nation.

Wellness Events

While team building events can (and should) be enjoyable activities meant to bring everyone together, they can also serve other purposes, such as a wellness team building event, which aims to help your team members improve their workflow by giving them a chance to relax and learn strategies to handle the daily stress and grind of the job. This can be as simple as learning a few basic chair stretching exercises to help team members care for their physical well-being or it can be as complex as weekly check-in workshops aimed at teams working on complex, high-stress projects.

Virtual Art & Meditation: In this guided art and meditation workshop, you and your team members will have the chance to experience the calming effects of artistic expression and guided meditation. This event blends the creative expression of an art team building event with the focused breathing and mindfulness-affirming work of a meditation program. This kind of event is a great way for teams working on stressful projects to have an afternoon or evening that aims to provide them with much needed rest and relaxation, and it will be a good way to teach your team members some mindfulness strategies that they can take home with them and utilize on their own.

Virtual Group Stretching and Alignment: Stress is not just mentally taxing, but it is also physically demanding, and that physical pain and discomfort can, in turn, be stress inducing. In this virtual group stretching and alignment workshop, you and your team members will learn some simple strategies to get ahead of the physical pains associated with the office that only utilize the chairs and desks that they have access to in their personal offices. These techniques can become part of your team member’s daily work day routine or something they utilize when their back or neck starts to sting a bit from prolonged sitting, whatever your team members feel is best for them. This program, when combined with some degree of mindfulness training, is a perfect way to bring attention to your employees’ mental health and provide them with some simple tools to help improve their work life.

Virtual Rough Day Recharge: Sometimes, you just need to take a break, spend some time focusing on your mental health and recharge your batteries to get back to work. In this rough day recharge team building event, you can schedule some down time for your team members to get together, do a bit of ASMR relaxation and play some light-hearted games (while looking at pictures of cute animals) as a way to help them mentally recharge for a moment before heading back off to work. Events like these won’t solve all of your team’s personal issues at work, but they will provide a space engineered to make the rest of their day (or week) easier.

Virtual Weekly Wind Down – Facilitated Meeting: If you work remotely or have a significant amount of team members who do, it can become daunting to get everyone together to feel less professionally isolated. These weekly meetings offer an ideal place for your team members to come together, debrief on the event of their week, and start looking forward to the week ahead. These meetings can be customized to fit the needs of your individual teams and departments, and the kinds of winding down can be tailored to the needs of your teams and projects. This kind of end-of-week rundown is a good way to get your team members in a groove if they are working remotely, and it can serve as a kind of regular contact between them and their co-workers.

Weekly Decompression for High Stress Teams: Sometimes, your teams need a bit more mental health assistance than a one-time workshop can provide. This can be the case for teams working on high stress projects, under tight deadlines, or dealing with massive shifts in their workflow or industry standards. These workshops offer your team a weekly opportunity to come together and engage in mental health awareness activities like meditation, yoga, art, and stretching. Caring for both body and mind, these weekly workshops will give your team members a space to express their frustrations and find common ground as they work with an expert facilitator to attend to their needs and the overall needs of their team.

What are the advantages of hosting a virtual team building activity?

This is really two different questions: What are the advantages of hosting a team building activity and what are the advantages of hosting that team building activity online?

The advantages of hosting a team building activity are straightforward. You want your team members to work better together as a team, and holding an event where they can socialize, learn more about one another, and work on a shared project or goal is an excellent way to do this. They are also excellent ways to reward team members for a job well done or the completion of a difficult project, which will help to make your team members feel more connected to their joint successes.

The advantage of hosting these events in a virtual space is primarily logistical, since it will make it far easier for many of your team members to attend the event, particularly if they are working remotely. In addition, there are several kinds of team building events, like cooking classes, scavenger hunts, online escape rooms, or mixology courses, that either work better in a virtual space or are built from the ground up to be run in a virtual space.

Running the event in a virtual space

Running a team building event online will come with a few considerations, but these can be easily addressed with the help of event organizers.

Supplies: One of the significant problems of a virtual team building activity is making sure that everyone has the supplies on hand for the event, particularly if it is an art or cooking event. In these online team building activities, all of the necessary supplies or dry ingredients will be shipped directly to your team members’ homes. This will ensure that everyone on your team can participate and that they can all follow the necessary instructions. Some items may need to be acquired by individual participants, but you can also give your team members gift cards to reimburse them for the purchase of things like milk or vodka.

Hosting: For many online events, it is important to have a skilled host who can keep the event moving and make sure that everyone is engaged. In addition, some online events need to have instructors, be they chefs, mixologists, artists, or sommeliers. In one of these team building events, your team members will work with an experienced host or instructor who can ensure that everyone is having fun and participating. For large enough groups, you may even work with multiple hosts running different events.

Organizing: Finally, you’ll need to consider how you intend to organize the event, since scheduling can be somewhat difficult. While you will be tasked with finding the day that works best for your team members, the service provider will handle issues like launching the digital workspace, doing prep work for the event, and handling things like assigning roles for games or gift exchanges.

Picking the right team building event for your team

There are several significant factors to consider when picking a team event, and many of these pertain to logistics and practicalities. This section aims to provide you with a brief overview of some of the things you’ll want to consider and how to factor those issues into the decisions you make about your team building events.

Group size

One important factor to consider when picking a team event is how many people you imagine are planning to attend, since this will greatly impact the kind of team building events that are best suited for your group. For example, if you plan on having 60 people attend, then running virtual escape rooms will require multiple hosts, and your team members will need to be broken up into smaller groups (which may not be conducive to your goals in the event). Likewise, if you only imagine 8 people attending, something like trivia might not be in the cards. While groups of any size can participate in most team building events, you’ll want to try and gauge how many people you expect to attend in order to ensure that the event goes off smoothly.

Focus and tone

While it may sound odd, you’ll want to consider the tone of the event you are planning and the goals that you have set out for the team building activity. If you want a fun, laid-back evening where your team members can interact and mingle, you may want to consider a more casual game or something like a mixology workshop. If your goal is to get your team members to work together and practice their lateral thinking and communication, an escape room will likely be better than a cooking class. If you want to reward your team members for a job well done, consider a tasting event, a holiday gift exchange, or a cooking workshop. The goals of any given event will vary from team to team, but considering the desired outcome is an important part of the process.

Price and Practicality

While it isn’t the most exciting thing to think about, you’ll also want to consider the price point of a given event and the practicality of hosting it in a virtual space (for all of your team members). For example, a cooking class might not be ideal for participants who don’t have access to a large kitchen at home, and a mixology class might be more difficult to attend if you need to account for time zones. Obviously, almost any event can be designed and customized to fit the needs of any given group, but it is worth considering questions like “Will I need to ensure that everyone has the proper supplies?” and “Will everyone be able to attend and participate without feeling shut out of the event?”

You’ll also want to consider the price point of the event and whether or not it is set up at a flat rate or a per-person rate. Per-person events tend to involve each member of your team getting something sent to them (ingredients, drinkware, materials for art workshops, etc.), while flat-rate events tend to be things like trivia or holiday parties. This isn’t the most important issue to consider, but you shouldn’t discount price and practicality when deciding what kind of team event to hold.

Customizing your team building event to fit your needs

One of the best aspects of hosting a team building event is the level of customization available to you. Not only do you have a wide range of different events to choose from, but you can also work directly with event coordinators to add additional elements to your event, make the event more focused on the kinds of work that your team members are responsible for or just asking your team members what they want out of the event. While you don’t have to customize the event if you don’t want to deal with the added logistics, it is good to know that you can work with professionals to ensure that your event goes off perfectly.